Squatting on the sidewalk, his cap firmly pulled down on his head, Farid smokes a cigarette. Awake since 7 a.m. and the morning arrival of dozens of police officers, social services and firefighters to evacuate his building, he waits there, between a khaki green wheeled suitcase and a large plastic and checkered moving bag . His whole life is contained therein.
Like Farid, about twenty other people are still waiting on this stretch of sidewalk for the departure of a bus bound for one of the four municipal gymnasiums mobilized by the town hall to carry out, with State services, an assessment of the individual situation of these displaced persons. The city will then have to offer them a temporary or permanent accommodation solution.
Between sleep dealers and drug traffickers
With their heap of belongings gathered in a hurry, these castaways from poor housing endemic to certain districts of Marseilles and maintained by economic misery look like refugees. We save what we can transport and what we imagine useful. Here a space heater resting on a blanket in its cover, there a fan next to a sleeping bag.
– “We are treated like clandos”, feels Farid, who asks where he is going.
– “We’re going to La Martine”, informs one of his former neighbors in the same situation as him.
– “La Martina?” It’s northern districts, that, ”he replies, indifferent, before boarding the bus a few minutes later. The municipal police open the barrier that closed the street to traffic; the driver drives off and Farid presses his tired face to the window.
They were 137 (24 children, 83 men and 30 women) shortly before noon this Tuesday morning to have been evacuated from Gyptis I, a building of degraded properties of 250 apartments in the 3rd arrondissement of Marseille – that of Belle-de-Mai – one of the poorest in France. During the operation, the services discovered the body of a man, visibly dead for several days in his apartment on the 10th and last floor.
Estimated at 200 people, the exact count of the number of residents of this building, made up of former student studios of 20 to 25 square meters, will probably only be known later. And for good reason: if some had rental contracts, others paid by hand their landlord, landlord or other. Another part of the housing was squatted or occupied by drug traffickers who held a point of sale there, adding to the socio-economic violence that of dealers and conflicts between rival gangs. Last September, shootings and stabbings increased around and inside the Gyptis, with at least one dead and several injured.
“When I went out at night, my father told me to sleep over with friends,” explains Ilyes, 20, who shared a studio on the 10th floor with his father. A second-year medical student, Ilyes is “happy to be leaving. It’s better for safety,” he explains. He follows his courses at the Timone campus, at the other end of the city. “It won’t be more complicated to get there,” said the young man who is waiting to see where they will be relocated. “We were warned 3-4 days ago of the evacuation”. Sufficient to “rent a box and store our belongings there”, continues the one who had resided in Gyptis for five years with a most legal lease.
According to the various testimonies collected, the rents of the studios were minted there between 400 and 500 euros. Sometimes with the methods of authentic sleep merchants. “I paid 250 euros in tickets every month,” says Adda, who shared the only room in the apartment with a stranger who gave the same amount. Arriving from Algeria just six months ago, Adda has no papers. “That’s the problem,” he concedes. “I thought of leaving before the evacuation but to go where? I don’t want to go back to sleep outside,” worries this mason who, like other undocumented immigrants in Marseille, finds his day jobs doing the crane’s foot at dawn in front of building materials stores.
Mohamed, a 48-year-old Moroccan of origin, has Italian papers. At Gyptis for four and a half years, his concern concerns his furniture. “A TV, a microwave, a fridge,” he lists. He was assured that he could come back for them later, but he doesn’t really believe it. Traffickers, this construction worker doesn’t want to talk too much about it. “I go to work in the morning, I come home in the evening and stay at home. I stay in my place, ”he summarizes.
What future for Gyptis?
The insalubrity of this building, infested with bed bugs, with common areas that we can see copiously tagged, with wild electrical bypasses and water leaks, had become frankly dangerous for its residents. Last year, “firefighters intervened there 66 times”, often for fire starts linked to electrical installations, shows Patrick Amico, housing assistant to the mayor of Marseille who came to the site with Laurent Carrié, delegate prefect for the ‘equal opportunities.
After several municipal and prefectural decrees for securing and dealing with insalubrity left a dead letter by the syndic, the town hall issued a final decree on February 16 ordering the evacuation of the building before March 6. It was a waste of time, the municipal and State services had to take the place of the private owners to carry it out and a judicial administrator was appointed to take the place of the trustee immediately.
In the wake of the evacuation, the entrances will be walled up, and anti-intrusion devices deployed. The owners will then have to decide to undertake the heavy work necessary to make the building healthy and livable. Failing this, the public authorities, via the mainland, could acquire the entire property.